


If Love Be Rough, Part One

by Arya_Greenleaf



Series: Would Smell As Sweet [4]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, M/M, Reunion Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 04:08:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10733802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arya_Greenleaf/pseuds/Arya_Greenleaf
Summary: After being caught in the act, Armchair realizes he's in over his head. Deciding to take a step back to re-evaluate his expectations from his arrangement with Kleenex, he realizes that he has unequivocally mucked things up. The question: can their budding relationship be saved?Does Huxwantto save it?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I set out to write a "meet the parents" fluff piece with some tooth-rotting affection and praise. This is not that story.

Kylo likes the weight of Hux against him.

Arguably, there isn’t much to him. He’s soft-bellied and slender. The barely-there definition of his arms and legs hint at his long-past military schooling—maybe one of those light kickboxing classes at a trendy gym.

It’s still weight.

It’s pleasant and grounding in a way that Kylo doesn’t quite recall with any other partner. He likes the way Hux moves his body, directing him with little nudges here and there. Hux doesn’t assume Kylo will take charge just because he’s bigger. He likes the way that he _doesn’t_ feel outsized and monstrous even though his own stature is much more substantial than Hux’s.

They fit together well. Literally and figuratively, Kylo thinks. The lack of messy emotions between them makes it easy. The lack of expectations takes the pressure off.

They both know what they want.

They read each other’s signals, let their encounters happen naturally.

It’s as simple as picking a time and a place—and remembering to bring the lube.

Hux’s lips are soft against the back of Kylo’s neck. There’s a _shhhwick_ sound as Hux adjusts himself, sweaty skin-to-skin contact breaking as his chest peels away from Kylo’s back.

Kylo rocks back on his knees, wanting to be close again, craving the overwhelming heat of Hux’s body against his, of Hux’s weight holding him against the mattress so he doesn’t float away.

“No, don’t go,” he shudders and moans, a sound that comes from deep in his belly. “Come back here,” he rocks back and wipes his forehead across the comforter. “Come back.”

They’ve been at this for what feels like hours with Hux moving in him so slowly, both of them working toward the edge and then thinking of baseball and HTML and tax forms. Over and over again, Kylo feels warmth bloom in the soles of his feet and race up the backs of his legs. He shivers and tightens his fingers around the base of his cock and waits for the sensation to ebb. It’s not quite tantric, probably far from it, but it feels good and that’s all Kylo cares about.

“I’ve got two weeks to make up for, don’t I?” Hux had teased when they tumbled into bed. The cab fare from JFK had been ridiculous, he could have just called Kylo to come pick him up. Hux’s ears turned red and he grumbled something about a surprise and thrown his shirt at him.

“Kylo,” he pants now, “I gotta—I need—“ Hux drops down against Kylo’s back again, pressing him into the mattress. Kylo feels Hux’s legs trembling as he rolls his hips in an increasingly random pattern. He makes a noise like someone stepped on one of BB’s toys as Kylo shifts, rising up a bit on his knees. “ _Kylo_ , fuck I—“

 

> Downstairs, Poe is shuffling tiredly through the front door and sipping cold coffee from a rest stop along the way from McGuire. The hour and a half drive is a killer every time. All Poe wants is to microwave his shitty coffee and collapse on the couch with his dog for the end of _Hawaii Five-O._
> 
> What he doesn’t want, is to walk in to find Ben’s office space in utter disarray with BB flopped in the middle of it all sleeping.
> 
> “BB!” he hisses, putting his coffee and keys down on the table Ben teaches at. “What happened?” The bulldog makes a put-out sound and rolls onto his side. “Oh _no_ , BB.” The papers he’s lying on are marked with red ink, Ben’s corrections to a student’s work. “Shit.” They’re crinkled and drooled on and BB seems completely satisfied with himself. “Where the hell is Ben?” Poe tries to smooth a page with neat twelve-point font blocks of text with little luck. He squints at BB, disappointed. “We are gonna have a serious conversation. You know you’re not supposed to be in here.”
> 
> He checks the living room and kitchen. “Ben?” Looking down at the paper in his hands he sighs, noticing Rey’s name at the top of the page. Of course it would be Ben’s hardest working student. _Of course_.

 

“—I _missed_ you.” Hux groans softly against Kylo’s hair, a string of colorful curses as he comes. “Fuck.”

Kylo teeters on the precipice, so close. He gasps, suddenly empty, and Hux is gripping his hips to get him to turn. Kylo swivels beneath him, bracketing his legs on either side of Hux’s body. “Hux, you—“

Hux leans in, mouthing sloppily against the corner of Kylo’s lips, pressing their foreheads together. He shifts his balance onto one elbow alongside Kylo’s head and shushes him. “Missed this.” Kylo gasps and shudders, two of Hux’s fingers sliding into him easily. Kylo sighs and melts down into the mattress, tension running out of his body as Hux scissors his fingers. “ _Kriffing_ fuck, you’re so good.” Kylo hooks a leg over Hux’s waist, pulling their bodies more flush. It forces Hux to readjust his hand between them, hitting the depths of him _just right_.

 

> Poe groans as he climbs the stairs, his back aching from the long drive and the day spent at a desk in an uncomfortable office chair. “Ben? You up here?”
> 
> “Just a minute!” Ben shouts from somewhere upstairs. His voice is strained, breathless. Poe pauses, squinting up at the landing. He can hear Ben swearing, making a sound like he did the one and only time he attempted to carve the turkey at Thanksgiving. He’d managed to slice his thumb open. They ordered take out.
> 
> “Are you okay?” He continues up the stairs, looking back as he hears BB’s nails _tap tap tapping_ against the wood floor.

 

Kylo is shaking, one hand gripping the back of Hux’s neck and the other flying up and down over his cock. “Just… just a minute,” he repeats, whispering against Hux’s cheek. Their foreheads are pressed together painfully. Kylo’s vision grows fuzzy, fat tears well in his eyes and roll down over his cheeks. He’s verging on overwhelmed, not sure if he’d rather burst out of his body or curl into himself and make everything come to a halt. “Just…”

Neither he nor Hux notice the soft squeak of the one loose floorboard on the landing. He’s focused on the warm flush that has settled in his cheeks and the flock of angry butterflies in his stomach and the way Hux’s eyelashes flutter against the crook of his nose instead of the cringy sensation of the lubricant on the condom Hux is still wearing cooling against his thigh.

“Fuck!” Kylo is coming hard, balls drawn up tight and hole clenching around Hux’s clever fingers. “ _Hux_.” His voice is hoarse, whole body tightening. Hux lets out a surprised _whoosh_ of breath as Kylo pulls him down, knees slipping.

“ _Creador._ ” Eyes wide as saucers, Kylo peeks over the rise of Hux’s narrow shoulder. Poe is standing in the doorway, a piece of paper clutched in one hand and the other slapped across his face, covering his eyes. “I—I’m so sorry—you—“ He thrusts the paper forward blindly in the general direction of the dresser on the wall by the door. It flutters to the floor and Poe back tracks. “Don’t you people know how doors work?” he calls out as he moves back toward the stairs.

“That was Poe, wasn’t it?”

“Uh huh.”

“Your oldest friend just saw my naked ass.”

“Uh huh.”

“While my fingers were—“

“Please stop.” His cock pulses weakly in his hand, body still hyper-stimulated, and Hux gently moves his fingers away. Kylo closes his eyes, waiting for the buzzing in his head to settle down. He still feels magnetic, electric, alive. Hux is still hovering over him, though Kylo supposes he can't really move with his hand still gripped into the hair at the back of his head. Slowly letting out a deep breath, Kylo tilts his face up to catch Hux's lips and kisses him softly. "Stay with me?"

“I think maybe I’m going to go home.” Hux huffs and throws his arm over his face when he flops to the side. The mood is effectively dead, electricity sparks and fizzles over Kylo's skin. Hux's mouth is twisted in an unattractive frown.

“Don’t, Hux, stay. We’re all adults. It’s not like Poe and I have never seen each other—“

“Kylo, please.” Kylo frowns at Hux and then at the mess splattered across his own chest. “I would like nothing more than to launch myself into the sun. I’m going to put my pants on and leave with as much dignity as I can muster.”

They lay in silence, several inches between them, until Poe seems to make it a point to announce he’s in the kitchen with the sound of silverware and dishes and running water echoing in the otherwise quiet house. Kylo swings his legs out over the edge of the bed and crosses the room, snagging the towel he’d last had wrapped around his head off of the doorknob. He bends down to pick the paper Poe had brought up off of the floor after he’s wiped the mess off of his chest. “Why is this _wet_?”

Kylo swears under his breath and gathers the sweatpants and tee that he’d been lounging in when Hux arrived off of the floor. Feeling Hux’s continued agitation, he slips down the hall into the bathroom to finish cleaning up and dressing. Looking at himself in the mirror, cheeks still flushed and hair just a bit on the shiny side from sweaty exertion, he shakes his head.

He doesn’t understand the depth of Hux’s upset. Sex is sex. It wasn’t a big deal. Poe was well aware of their arrangement and expressed no displeasure at having Hux make the occasional appearance at the house. How many times had they sat together over the kitchen island, bag of hot bagels between them after Hux had stayed the night?

Kylo swipes at his chest with a damp washcloth and then runs it between his legs, ridding himself of the slick slide of lubricant if not totally expunging physical evidence of what he’d thought was a well-spent afternoon. He slips into his clothes and ties his hair back and remembers the horrified expression on Poe’s face.

He flushes a deep red, rubbing the heels of his palms hard over the tear tracks on his cheeks, and suddenly shares Hux’s desire to jettisoned into space. He shakes his head and runs the tap, cupping his hands under the cold water and splashing it copiously against his face. “Fuck.”

Kylo passes his bedroom, raising a brow at the closed door. He taps with a knuckle and Hux’s soft reply from the other side that he’s getting dressed makes him blush ferociously again. He breathes in deeply and descends the stairs two at a time, calling Poe’s name. In the kitchen, there is a small pot of water on the stove. It’s barely warm, a box of mac n’ cheese stands ready beside it. BB is on the back patio, snuffling and snapping at a small white butterfly as it flutters around the pot of marigolds beside the door.

“Poe?”

“I’m in here.”

Kylo follows the sound of his voice into the office. He stands mildly confused. Poe is squatted on the floor, gathering up papers and trying to smooth them out. He straightens up, mumbles something to himself, and stacks the pages together, setting a pile of heavy books down on top of them.

“What the heck happened in here?” Kylo bends to scoop up the last few papers and adds the damp page Poe had dropped upstairs.

“BB had a party.”

“How?”

“When I came in, the gate was down.”

“Did he knock it over or something?”

“No, it was there.” He gestures toward the baby gate leaned up against the wall beside the doorway Kylo just came through.

“Shit. Poe, don’t worry about that stuff, it’s my own fault.”

“BB’s my dog, Ben.”

“And I’m the idiot that forgot to close the door or put the stupid gate up. He doesn’t know any better and you weren’t even home.” He catches Poe’s hand as he goes to grab another book to weight down a second stack of papers. “Poe, stop. Go finish making your dinner. I can clean this up.”

Poe smiles weakly, clearly exhausted, and pats Kylo on the shoulder as he moves by. Kylo finishes cleaning up and closes the door firmly behind himself. He sits down at the kitchen island, swinging his foot back and forth and brushing his toes against the tiled floor.

“Did Hux lea—“

“Poe, I’m sorry.”

“I wanted to apologize to him.”

“I think that would just embarrass him more.”

“Alright.”

“Poe, I—“

“Ben. It’s not like I’m your mom catching you with your first boyfriend. You’re consenting adults.” He dumps the dry shells into the boiling water. “Consenting adults that should probably remember how to close doors, since that seems to be the root of all our problems today.” He gives Kylo a wry look over his shoulder and opens the microwave, taking a paper cup from a convenience store out. He blows over the top before he takes a sip and cringes.

“ _Ack_ , Poe, let me make you a fresh cup. That doesn’t even smell like coffee anymore.”

Poe attempts another sip and grimaces, “It’s fine.”

Kylo gets up and comes around the island, snatching it from his hand and dumping it before he can object. He takes the can of coffee out of the fridge and loads up a re-usable pod, pops it into the Keurig. As the machine in grumbling in seeming protest over doing the job of heating water and pushing it through the grounds, Kylo can hear the soft sound of Hux’s tread on the stairs.

“Kylo,” he calls softly from beyond the glass doors that lead from the living room into the front of the house. Poe jerks his chin toward the sound, stirring his pasta.

Kylo tries to pull Hux into his arms, tries to press a kiss behind his jaw, “Hey, _hey_. It’s fine.”

“I’m going to go home, my Uber is waiting outside.” He scuffs the toe of his shoe against the small suitcase sitting on the floor beside him.

“Don’t. Stay over, please? Poe isn't--”

“No, Kylo. I just…” He folds his arms, “I think we need to—I think I need some space.”

Kylo’s heart clenches in his chest, his stomach flips. “You what?”

“I need some space. We’ve… we’ve been—it’s too much. I need to reevaluate things. I—“ A text message lights up the phone in his breast pocket, the glow of it just barely visible through the dark color of his shirt. “That’s my car. I have to go, Kylo.”

“Can I call you?” Hux closes his eyes and sighs, pulls up the handle on his case. “Will you call me?”

“Later. Maybe.”

“Hux—“

“Goodbye, Carrot Cake.” He smiles weakly, the expression barely reaching the corners of his mouth.

Kylo stands in the little darkened alcove, photographs on the wall looking down at him accusingly. He listens as Hux opens and closes the front door. The suitcase doesn’t bump down the stairs. Hux is more efficient than that. He’s probably picked it up. _Ah_ , there’s the wheels on the pavement of the front walk. Car door opening and closing.

The street is quiet after Hux pulls away.

Poe knocks against the doorframe, glass rattling a little. Steam curls around his face from the bowl of bright orange mac n’ cheese in his hand. “Everything okay?”

Kylo clears his throat and forces a smile onto his lips. “Yeah! He’s gotta work early in the morning. Just came back from a business trip.”

Poe squints, suspicious, and back-steps into the living room. “Alright.” Kylo hesitates for a moment before following. “C’mon. I missed _Five-O._ Let’s finish our _Flash_ marathon. I wanna know if the Trickster gets away. I have the distinct feeling he knows more than he’s letting on.”

Kylo smiles more genuinely then. They settle on opposite ends of the couch. BB wanders in from the patio and lumbers over. He struggles for a moment, front legs up on the couch between them and trying to get a back leg up onto the tall furniture. Kylo bends down and lifts him. The dog is snoring in moments, adding an extra layer of soundtrack to Barry Allen’s adventures.


	2. Chapter 2

Hux tries to participate in the amiable conversation that his driver offers, finally apologizing and blaming the long flight for his lack of social courtesy.

“No sweat, man. You visiting? Doing the tourist thing?”

“I, what? No, no, I live here. We’re going to my home.”

“Oh! Cool.”

“Mm.”

“You didn’t look very, ah, very happy comin’ out of the house back there.”

Hux clenches his jaw and counts to ten. As a general rule, he hates chatty Uber drivers. He knows they mean well, mostly, but they get too personal. “Just not looking forward to going back to work. You know, the daily grind.”

“Do I ever! What do you do?”

Hux clenches his fist inside his jacket pocket, nails digging into his palms. “Cube farm. Number crunching. Mind numbing stuff.”

“My day job isn’t much more interesting.”

Hux turns one side of his mouth up into a poor semblance of a smile and he nods in commiseration. Discretely, he shifts his phone in his hand and leans on the volume-down button until it’s vibrating loudly. He turns it over and glances at the screen for a moment, furrowing his brow.

“I’m so sorry, I need to answer this.”

“Hey, do what you gotta, man. No problem!”

Hux clears his throat and puts the phone, no one actually on the other end of the line, against his ear. “You’ve reached Hux.” He carries on a one-sided conversation as they make their way up the turnpike and through the tunnel. He pretends that he’s lost reception just before they pass the painted New Jersey-New York border. It whizzes by in a flash of red and blue on the tiled walls. “I apologize. I don’t mean to be one of _those_ passengers.”

“Don’t worry about it! Sounds like you’re a little bit more than a number cruncher.”

“Well, my cubicle is a bit nicer than the others.”

The driver chuckles and is relatively quiet for the remainder of the ride, focused on trying to navigate the city streets. Finally, they pull up in front of Hux’s building. He takes a few bills out of his wallet and presses them into the cup holder while the driver protests. Hux jumps out of the car and snags his suitcase from the back, he thanks them and waves, thumbing buttons on the app to confirm that the experience was fine.

Home.

At long last.

The two weeks that he spent back at the main office in London feel like they may well have been two years. He strips out of his clothes as he moves through the small apartment and leaves the suitcase at the door. His bed is crisply made; the way it was when he left. He flops down onto it and stares up at the ceiling for an indeterminate amount of time. When the sun has finally well and truly set, he hears the soft _plink plink!_ of his phone sitting on the coffee table outside receiving text messages.

He closes his eyes, ignores it.

He’s tempted for a moment to just crawl beneath the covers the way he is, underclothes and socks. But, he feels as though he can still smell Kylo on his skin.

He’s… _revolted._

By all of it.

Hux sits up and disrobes the rest of the way just a bit more forcefully than necessary and shoves all of it into the hamper. He turns the water in the shower on, letting it get as hot as he can tolerate. He avoids his reflection, steam curling in tendrils around his face, and steps into the spray. He washes roughly, leaving himself pink and feeling as if he’s turned over a fresh layer of skin.

A new _Hux_ that Ben Solo had never touched.

He slides into bed, hair damp against the pillows, and into the oblivion of sleep.

It’s amazing, he thinks as he goes about his morning routine, that he isn’t effected by the time difference. He supposes that by the time he put his head down, that the stress of travel and the extra-long hours he’d worked those two weeks—topped off with the humiliation and anger that had burned through him like a double-ended candle—had just been that exhausting. The rock-like sleep that had taken him and held fast through the night hadn’t done a damned thing for the purplish swelling under his eyes. He holds a bag of frozen peas against his face while he sits on the couch sipping his coffee, hoping to bring the color down just the slightest bit before he makes his way into the office.

Hux spends the morning at his desk with the door firmly closed. His inbox is full. His subordinates in London seem to have forgotten how to function the moment he stepped out of the building. He clicks through their messages mindlessly, forwarding most of them to other departments to be taken care of properly. He manages a few hours before he’s driven to distraction, fingers twitching toward his phone in anticipation of the request for a video chat that usually comes in just before noon.

“Stop it, Armitage,” he scolds himself and tries to focus on the computer screen once again.

He flies through the lunch hour, firing off emails about a confidential project. It’ll be their most important acquisition yet—the thing that he’d had to spend two weeks back across the ocean for, hopping from London to Munich and back again to ensure that everything was handled in the most efficient way and wrangling all of those people involved from various satellite groups into his method.

 _“Starkiller_ will be the most important global business initiative in recent history. It is imperative that every _I_ is dotted and _T_ is crossed,” he signs off from the last message of the day that he can reasonably deal with concerning the deal and leans back in his chair, fingers laced behind his head. He likes the code name he’s given the project. It fits well for what it is, he thinks.

“Hey!” Hux startles as Phasma appears in his threshold, ignoring the closed door. “I didn’t expect you back until tomorrow at the earliest.”

Hux shakes his head and lets his chair fall back parallel to the floor again. “Too much to do.”

Phasma nods knowingly. They’d crossed paths in Munich, spending dinner together before she had to catch a flight to Stockholm with several members of her security task force in tow to review a reported hacking in one of their holdings.

“You look like hell,” she says as she plunks down in one of the chairs at the small meeting table in the corner and puts her feet up on the other. Armitage looks at her appraisingly. Travel always treated her well. He suspects the chrome colored ankle boots are new, a souvenir. “I was going to ask if you wanted to get dinner tonight—just us. I’ve got a few things I’d like to discuss about Stockholm.” Her lips turn up in the most subtle of smiles and her eyes crinkle at the corners. “Unless you have plans already. It’s been a while since you’ve seen the boy-toy in the flesh. How _is_ the First Son doing?”

Hux sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Phas, we’ve been over this, he’s not—“

“I know, _I know_. I just like to tease. You get so flustered.” She stretches, pointing her toes and reaching into the air. “Your father would have an aneurysm if he knew you were fucking Organa’s—”

“The Commandant has no reason to ever know. It’s not as if we’re together.”

“You sure about that, Mitt?”

“We have an arrangement. That’s all.”

Phasma shakes her head. “You certainly act like it’s more than just an _arrangement_. You were never good at hooking up, Mitt.”

“Excuse me, I—“

“You’re too intense. You don’t do anything half-assed.” Hux purses his lips and grips the arms of his chair hard enough that his hands begin to shake. “Do you remember that class we had together our first year? The professor that used to make us debate all the time. There was that one on military training strategy. You nearly threw up you were so… into it.”

Hux counts silently to ten and releases his grip on the arms of the chair. “Ky—Ben Solo and I are not in a relationship.”

Phasma softens for the briefest of moments, “You like him, though.”

“Of course I like him. I wouldn’t be,” he drops his voice and hisses across the room, “sticking my cock in someone I didn’t like.”

“Avaah says—“

“Avaah says, _Avaah says_! I’m so tired of hearing about that superior little brat.”

Phasma snorts, “Takes one. Avaah says, that Kylo’s completely enamored with you.”

“Well, that’s his problem, isn’t it?”

“He’s never actually said it out loud, of course. But evidently he gets all moony when you text him. And he’s walked out on rehearsals—recording? Whatever a band does—for you.”

“What?”

She nods sagely and takes her feet off the chair, crossing her legs instead. “Supposedly it’s been gradual and then after that week you spent at his place with the flu…” She trails off, letting Hux make of it what he will.

“So he likes playing nurse, big deal. We just… hung out and ate soup. It’s not as if it was a week-long date.”

“Well, there certainly has to be something more there than just… platonic fuck buddies?” Hux scoffs, “If he was willing to drive your ass to an emergency room at… what was it? Three in the morning? And then take you back to his house to convalesce. While you were all snotty and coughing up a lung? Mitt, I love you like a brother, but even I wouldn’t have done all of that.”

“So he’s a more compassionate person than you.” Phasma rolls her eyes. “That doesn’t mean there’s anything more between us. Not like that.” Hux’s stomach flips over. He glances at his phone, checking the time. He thinks he’s entitled to call it an early day after all of his travel. “Where do you want to go for dinner?” Phasma shrugs and make a non-committal sound. “Come by my place, we’ll order something.” He turns back toward his computer and answers one last email while Phasma scrolls through something on her phone. “I’m heading out. Let them try to say something.” He clicks through the workload reporting form, enters his hours for the day, and shuts down the computer. Phasma stands when he does and waits while he locks his office.

“I’ll see you later then.”

“Mm.” Hux waves over his shoulder.

“Was it something I said?”

“No, Phas.”

Hux feels tight, like a spring that had been compressed too far, like he is going to split his skin open and burst out with a scream that is trapped carefully behind his teeth. He peels off his suit jacket and abandons it and his shoes to pace back and forth in his bedroom. His eyes fall on his bedside table. The drawer was full of all the small things that he didn’t like the light of day to touch, pleasures and vices alike. He pauses, hands drawn up toward his chest and curled into fists, and closes his eyes. He takes a deep breath and lets it out, silently counting to ten.

It’s no use.

Hux wrenches open the drawer, making the contents slide around with the force of it and fishes out an orange bottle and a pack of cigarettes. He swears when he can’t find a match or his Zippo and goes to the kitchen. Hux lights a cigarette from the gas flame of the stovetop, face warmed by the flickering blue tongues when he leans close. Cigarette clenched between his lips, he twists the cap off of the bottle, cursing the child-proofing, and spills a pill out into his palm. The letters on the label shout at him in bold black font.

ONE TABLET BY MOUTH AS NEEDED

DO NOT EXCEED 4MG PER 24 HRS

He swallows the pill dry and returns to the bedroom, waving his hand through the smoke that trails behind him as he goes and throws open the window. On the outer sill, he’s hidden an ash tray. He drags it over, glass making a sound against the brick that rattles his teeth, and ashes his cigarette before taking another long drag.

“Fuck.”

Two cigarettes later, Hux finally feels steady enough to think. His brain is less muddled with panic and anger and the general static of _everything_ going on at once.

He inventories all the ways in which he has completely, utterly, royally fucked things up—all of the signs that should have pointed to _Armitage, you are in over your head_ like flashing neon and that he’d never noticed.

The way that Kylo looked at him, touched him. Much more than the perfunctory regard that was required for the arrangement that Hux had proposed.

All of the small affections, all of the big ones. Taking care of him when he was ill. Texting to remind him of something he’d mentioned off-hand in a post-coital haze, filling the void with talk about work.

The way Kylo leaned in to touches, cat-like and tender, and how his eyes smiled.

The steady rearranging of lunch-hours and breaks after-work plans to best accommodate mutual schedules.

The way Hux felt his stomach flutter each time the text-tone that he’d assigned to Kylo rang out from his phone and how he felt disappointed when a request for a video call wasn’t from him.

How browsing for clothing online had become tangled up with thoughts about _Kylo liked that color on me last week_ and what might be more appropriate for comfort and quick removal at the latest of his gigs. The fact that he'd even been  _going_ to Kylo's gigs.

The way Hux felt at a loss, two weeks bereft of touch and the scent of Kylo’s skin when it was warm with exertion and damp with salty-sweet sweat.

With shaking hands, Hux stubs out the cigarette in his hand, hardly much more than the filter clutched between his index finger and thumb. He reaches for the pack and starts to slide another out, chest burning with smoke laced with acrid _feeling_.

He slides the cigarette back into the pack and tosses it into the still-open drawer it came from. He pushes the ash tray back into its hiding spot, closes the window.

He’d gone too far.

Hadn’t wanted any of what he wound up with.

And now it’s impossible to take it back.

“Fuck.”

The illusion of intimacy came crashing down around Hux’s ears when he looked at it more closely. Kylo’s housemate walking in on them had made everything too real, had ripped away the veil that he’d been looking through since the laundromat parking lot and making out in the back of a junky looking but impossibly organized van. Hux wasn’t upset that it had happened, not exactly. Not overly embarrassed, really. But, the simple fact that Poe Dameron existed, that he shared Kylo’s space and his life and his deepest secrets—as Hux imagined a life-long friend might—made Hux’s stomach sour with want and _need_ and a thousand other things that he didn’t have the time or the energy for.

Kylo had so many of those things. He was surrounded in every aspect of his life by people who adored him. His family, Poe. His students. Even his shitty band.

Why did he want Hux as well? Couldn’t he see that Hux wasn’t—

Phasma spends the night, too tired to make the trek home after their late dinner and two bottles of dark red wine between them. Hux lies awake beside her in his bed, staring up at the ceiling. She shifts, pulling the comforter toward herself and nestling her forehead against his shoulder. Hux turns to look at the digital clock at the bedside, red display blinking at him that it is three in the morning and he is pathetic.

He picks his phone up, stretching the charging cord as far as it will go so as to not jostle Phasma by moving. He squints into the glare of the screen and thumbs through his contacts.

_Kleenex Kyle-Ben Solo Cup_

He hesitates, tapping into the contact card and chewing his bottom lip.

_DELETE CONTACT?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come yell at me over on tumblr or direct complaints to the box below.


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